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A number of weeks ago MyWibes users were informed that the service was shutting down. In light of those news, we have gotten in touch with their staff and offered to continue hosting MyWibes accounts on our servers and integrate them into our building tool, to ensure that the sites remain available in the future and users can continue to maintain them. We have completed the move and MyWibes users will be glad to know that they can now login into their sites via http://xtgem.com/mywibes

In other news, we have a meaty update for XtGem planned within the next few weeks. Namely: Updated site templating, container support and a completely rewritten markup parser.

Markup parser is the core technology of XtGem, providing the link between the building tool and text editor. Current parser, while does it's job, has not aged well - it has been in use since the very first day of XtGem. More advanced XtGem users are well aware of it's negative nuances - having to use the text editor exclusively to ensure that the building tool does not mess up their markup. Those same users will be very happy to hear that, after a lot of careful planning, we have rewritten it from scratch. Once it is deployed into production, building tool and text editor will work in harmony and you will not have to worry about losing code indentation, whitespace or, in extreme cases, code.Since this is an update to a very critical part of XtGem, we will be running a beta test to make sure that it works as expected and we have the opportunity to squash the remaining bugs. Keep an eye out on XtBoard for more information once it becomes available!

This updated parser has allowed us to expand the functionality of the building tool as well - and the very first thing that we focused on is container support. Containers are basically separate builder blocks that can contain blocks within themselves. They allow for a better separation of page sections - for example you might want to have a container for header elements, another one for navigation items and the third one for page content. You will be able to collapse them and have complex content hierarchies, which will speed up content maintenance by a lot.But we did not stop there! XtGem will be able to recognize block context from the parent container and support blocks that are specific to it. You will, for example, be able to create a navigation container and add navigation items to it, or set up a gallery container and add images to it using a dedicated UI.

Given the support for more markup structures and blocks, we have spent the past couple of months working on another huge feature - updated site templates.Currently site templates simply apply a basic CSS file to the whole site - which works fine, but leaves something to be desired. Updated site templates will be a lot more sophisticated, providing professional-quality look, vast configuration options and device-specific functionality. You will be able to tweak template look on the fly (or choose from a bunch of predefined presets) and XtGem will generate cross-device-compatible markup and CSS - including appropriate containers, stylesheets and code that will make your site work on a variety of devices, from feature phones to smartphones to desktop browsers. Site templates and containers will launch shortly after the updated parser hits production.

We are very fortunate to get as much feedback and suggestions as we do. Since adding support for PHP, some of the most-requested features were FTP and MySQL support. I won't disclose the specifics yet, but assure you that we are currently testing various ways to implement these two technologies into XtGem. Stay tuned!

You were probably all wondering why it was all so silent regarding XtGem lately. Well, a lot has hapened behind the scenes during that time. Let me take a moment to fill you all in.

Biggest news is that we're expanding! Currently 6 people are working on XtGem and we have just opened our offices in Vilnius (capital of Lithuania). It's a cozy work environment that we've put a lot of thought and time to set up.

As for the staff, in addition to me, XtGem now employs 3 programmers, a dedicated systems administrator and a HR/PR person.While it's still a considerably small team, it will allow us to constantly bring new features to our users and quickly react to feedback you guys give... [Continue reading]

Although it took longer than previously anticipated for me to deploy this thing, I am really pleased with the result. And I believe you all will be too

XtGem has been immersed into social networking for a while now (We are on Twitter, Facebook and XtBoard -- do check 'em out if you haven't yet). And although these are great channels for breaking news and building a community, there was a lack of a central hub to aggregate all that content.

Not only this blog has solved that problem, it will also allow me to produce more written content. I will do my best to constantly... [Continue reading]